In the Details: Masks, Memory, and Narrative Defiance
"A Mask the Color of the Sky" practices what it clearly laid out: using literature to engage obsessively with colonial details, to challenge them, and to insist on a Palestinian narrative ...
Maria Douaihy: ‘The Play is Everything’
“With Yehia, the play is everything. So, we make sure that sets, costumes and props fit in one car. This way we are ready to perform at short notice." - Maria Douaihy on "Qornet el Bayda." ...
‘On the Back of Restless Winds’
In his 2015 autobiography, A Time of Wind, Anxiety, and Freedom (أزمنة الريح والقلق والحرية ), Sudanese scholar Dr. Hayder Ibrahim Ali offers a rare and insightful account of Sudan’s intellectual and political life ...
Lamia Ziadé’s ‘Rue de Phénicie’
Lebanese artist and writer Lamia Ziadé’s fifth illustrated book for adults, Rue de Phénicie, (Phoenicia Street), is a work of intellectual rigor and personal honesty. It’s a story that begins with finding hedonistic joy in Paris grows progressively more complicated by her excavations of the past and grappling with the present ...
’48 kg’: Creating Life from a Desire to Diminish and Fade Away
Gaza-based Palestinian writer Husam Maarouf responds to Batool Abu Akleen's '48 kg.' ...
Songs of the Unspeakable
When can loss that never ends be said to have happened? When will absence finally finish arriving? Who is the self if left partial, displaced from identity to be found neither here nor there? And if loss defines us, when may we be ourselves? ...
On ‘Fighting Ideological Fantasy with Fiction’
Several authors who contributed short stories to the collection spoke about their thoughts on the collapse of time, historical continuities and the notion of fighting ideological fantasy with fiction ...
A Single, Slow Exorcism: The Nakba Dreamed Backwards
From the very first lines of her introduction, editor Basma Ghalayani thrusts us right into a hurried, pulsing Gaza. A passerby asks a Gazan sprinting down the street if something has happened. He answers, “no, but it might.” ...
Muhammad Makhzangi’s ‘The Smell of the Sun’
"In Makhzangi’s world, existence unfolds through affection, love, and memory, all leading toward that last serene surrender. Death is therefore not an end but the ultimate form of belonging, the moment when everything returns to the vast, breathing rhythm of life itself." ...
